>Courts Gone Wild: New Jersey has almost forgotten what it was like to live in a state governed by laws, rather than men.
Senator Doherty has really been taking his Fair School Funding show on the road in a big way. Last night, I learned that Ridgewood is about the fiftieth municipality he’s visited so far in an effort explain his fair school funding plan.
Most residents, voters, and taxpayers not steeped in the fine points of municipal law in New Jersey are probably not aware of the extent to which the Supreme Court has been blatantly legislating from the bench. In fact, the Supreme Court has been usurping the power of the New Jersey legislature for so long, and with so little effective criticism, that almost the whole body of lawyers in this state can be considered complicit.
New Jersey’s two law schools, Rutgers School of Law|Newark and Seton Hall Law School are not immune from criticism either. The professors in these schools know that the Supreme Court has overstepped its authority. Nevertheless, because they agree politically with the policies, they refuse to say what they know.
Really–politically (if not economically) speaking, it’s as if we live in North Korea. The populace of New Jersey has almost forgotten over the course of two generations what it was like to live in a state governed by laws, rather than men. The New Jersey Supreme Court has no right to mangle or reinvent our state constitution for its political purposes!
Don’t forget that the Supreme Court’s “Mount Laurel Doctrine” is based on its having found in the New Jersey state constitution a right to affordable housing. The fact that no such right exists in the Constitution was no impediment to the Supreme Court inventing and enforcing it.
The current school funding problem is the child of similar misbehavior on the part of the New Jersey Supreme Court, dating back at least to 1985, when the NJ Supreme Court issued its first ‘Abbott’ decision. In that decision, the court ruled that to satisfy the New Jersey Constitution, the State must assure urban children an education enabling them to compete with their suburban peers. The weak-kneed response by the New Jersey legislature to this Abbott decision, and to the some twenty further Abbott decisions that the Supreme Court has issued since, has been to simply raise state-backed per-pupil spending on urban children through the roof while allowing state-backed per-pupil spending on suburban children to dwindle almost to nothing in school districts like Ridgewood.
Not that the New Jersey Supreme Court would ever agree, because it is so full of itself it can’t bear to be criticized, but the school funding formula that is used now is clearly unconstitutional. It mandates hugely unequal spending.
By contrast, Doherty’s plan to equalize state-backed per-pupil spending is clearly constitutional. It is also easy to explain. Best of all, it is eminently fair. Ridgewood’s VC and Board of Ed should both pass resolutions in support of it
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